scott pilgrim vs the world the game another winter

the World” is the best video game movie ever may sound like absurdly faint praise, though I have high hopes for “Tron: Legacy.” Most films that try to exploit the popularity of gaming mimic the look and mood of state-of-the-art first-person games, rather than the cruder, more cartoony ones evoked here. Their powers and his are tallied up on-screen, and he must negotiate a complex system of points, levels and lives of a kind easily recognizable to any joystick jockey. His post-adolescent life - rehearsing with his band, mooning over some girls and avoiding others, hanging out with his roommate, moping and napping and avoiding work - is periodically disrupted by spectacular battles with mighty foes. But Scott, played by Michael Cera with even less macho swagger than he showed in “Juno” and “Superbad” (he has the voice of Gumby and the muscle tone to match), is also a video game character. He is a 22-year-old bass guitarist who plays the game Dance Dance Revolution on a date with one girlfriend and tries to impress both her and another would-be girlfriend with arcane lore about the origins of Pac-Man.

These are part of Scott’s life in the usual way. (“Wait, they make movies in Toronto?” says Scott Pilgrim, deadpanning one of a million quick little jokes threaded through the action.) The drab, mumbly realism with which the director Edgar Wright depicts that city is offset - subverted, enlivened, thrown into crazy do-it-yourself pop-art relief - by images and situations drawn from arcade video games. I don’t mean the streets of Toronto, where the movie is set, and which we have all seen on-screen before, usually pretending to be the streets of other cities. Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world even if the landscape is, at first glance, unfamiliar.

the World,” based on a series of sprightly graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, has the opposite effect. There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t.

Scott pilgrim vs the world the game another winter